Semester 2 in Relection

Looking back on this semester I am extremely pleased with my progress. I feel this project has taught me a lot and I have most most certainly evolved and grown as an artist. Although I still have further to travel I am much more confidant with my work than I was before. I used to hate drawing/painting faces and would instead design characters with masks or other similarly obscuring items. Either that or I would draw them in a stylised manner so as to avoid detail.

Now though, I feel I understand faces and heads a lot better. Using this project as a tool to force myself into studying my artistic nemesis (or at least one of them) and addressing my short comings has allowed me to overcome many of them. That’s not to say I don’t still have a lot which can be improved, I still struggle with a number of areas.

One such area is natural skin tones, which I still have a tendency to render as very brown or tobacco. That being said, I have improved in this area and can now recognise and fix my errors with adjustment layers. I would still like to be able to avoid the problem in the first place though.

Another area which I still need to improve on is constructing faces from my imagination. However this was never specifically part of the brief, which was focused on teaching me only how to paint faces. As such I used photos of friends and online models as reference throughout the project. This has allowed me to learn many of the commonalities in facial structure and how best to paint them.

Hence, I think that learning to draw faces from the imagination is the perfect continuation of this project and I plan to do this over the summer break. Hopefully this will mean that I can return to fourth year with my skills at facial rendering significantly improved. Then all I need to do is improve on the rest of anatomy.